Do we really need an updated, edulcorated, and cutesy stage version of The Aspern Papers? A. R. Gurney Jr. evidently thought so, for that is what he gave us with The Golden Age. Tom, a young part-time teacher and would-be writer, infiltrates the Upper East Side brownstone that Mrs. Isabel Hastings Hoyt shares with her mousy granddaughter, Virginia…. As Tom … starts to write a book about the Golden Age—the age of his beloved F. Scott Fitzgerald—he becomes convinced that Mrs. Hoyt was Fitzgerald's mistress and the model for Daisy, and that the (as he sees it) important missing sexual chapter of The Great Gatsby must be, in manuscript form, somewhere in this house….

It is all awesomely precious and coy and shaggy-doggy, with unbelievable characters and plot, and cheap tricks the foremost of which is the black notebook that may or may not contain the Gatsby...